Salesforce.com Inc (CRM) Q4 2018 Earnings Conference Call Transcript

Salesforce.com, Inc. (NYSE: CRM)Q4 2018 Earnings Conference CallFeb. 28, 2018, 5:00 p.m. ET

Prepared Remarks:

Operator

Good afternoon. My name is Erica and I will be your conference operator today. At this time, I would like to welcome everyone to the CRM Q4 Earnings Call. All lines have been placed on mute to prevent any background noise. After the speakers' remarks, there will be a question-and-answer session. If you would like to ask a question during this time, simply press * then the number 1 on your telephone keypad. If you would like to withdraw your question, press the # key. Thank you.

Mr. John Cummings, you may begin your conference.

John Cummings -- Senior Vice President, Investor Relations

Thanks, Erica, and good afternoon, everyone, and thanks for joining us for our Fiscal Fourth Quarter and Year-End 2018 Results Conference Call. Our results press release, SEC filings, and a replay of today's call can be found on our IR website at www.salesforce.com/investor. With me on the call today is Marc Benioff, Chairman and CEO; Keith Block, Vice Chairman, President and COO; Mark Hawkins, our President and CFO; also joining us today is Bret Taylor, our President and Chief Product Officer.

As a reminder, our commentary today will primarily be in non-GAAP terms. Reconciliations between our GAAP and non-GAAP results and guidance can be found in our earnings press release. Additionally, our commentary today and the guidance we provide are under prior accounting standards, ASC 505, pre-revision ASC 340, and ASC 325 and we expect to provide updated guidance under the new accounting standards, including ASC 606, ASC 340-40, and ASU 201601, all of which we adopted on February 1st, 2018 and will do that in the coming weeks.

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Some of our comments today may contain forward-looking statements, which are subject to risks, uncertainties and assumptions. And, should any of these materialize or should our assumptions prove to be incorrect, actual company results could differ materially from these forward-looking statements. A description of these risks, uncertainties and assumptions, and other factors that could affect our financial results are included in our SEC filings including our most recent report on Form 10-K.

So, with that, let me turn the call over to you, Marc.

Marc Benioff -- Chairman and Chief Executive Officer

Alright. Thank you so much. I really appreciate that, John, and I just want to congratulate our entire company and all of our shareholders and investors on just what has been an outstanding Q4 and has really capped off just a truly record year for Salesforce.

This has also just been an outstanding quarter of growth. You can see that we have propelled Salesforce over the $10 billion revenue milestone and we couldn't be more excited about that and having that fiscal year behind us because now our vision has never been bigger or more exciting as we have a very clear trajectory to $20 billion in revenue. No other enterprise software company has achieved this scale faster -- certainly, no other enterprise cloud application company has achieved this scale faster -- and it's our dream to get to $20 billion faster than anyone else. It's been a relentless focus on our customer success and not just customer, but also all of our community, all of our employees, our customers, our partners, all of our key stakeholders and the development of just incredible culture that has allowed us to scale this organization and continue to strengthen our position as the world's No. 1 CRM.

There's been incredibly strong demand and execution, especially this quarter, across every industry, across every region cloud, all customer segments, and as we get through these opening comments, I'm sure you'll agree this may be, perhaps, our best quarter ever. We're on a path to exceed $20 billion faster than any other enterprise software company in history and we're all very proud of that. Salesforce is No. 1 today in CRM, which is the fastest growing segment of the Enterprise software industry.

Fiscal Year '18 revenues finalized out at $10.48 billion, up 25%, and that 25%, obviously, is dramatically above where we thought we were going to be when we first gave you a forecast more than a year ago, 24% in constant currency. We're delighted with that result. Q4 revenue of $2.85 billion, up 24% year-over-year, 21% in constant currency. But, perhaps, what we're most excited about and speaks to the velocity of the company, more than $20 billion of booked business on and off the balance sheet, up 40%, and that exceeded our expectations.

Deferred revenue of $7.09 billion, up 28% year-over-year and 25% in constant currency. Unbilled deferred revenue, $13.3 billion, up 48% year-over-year. Q4 operating cash flow of $1.05 billion, up 49% year-over-year, and Fiscal Year '18 operating cash flow of $2.74 billion, also up 27% year-over-year. We are also then able to raise our Full-Year Fiscal Year '19 revenue guidance by $150 million, bringing us up to an expected consistent growth rate projected over the next year of more than 21%.

Great companies do more than create great products and great services -- companies like Salesforce build trust with all of their stakeholders: with our employees, our customers, our partners, our shareholders, all of our community -- or, as we say at Salesforce, our ohana, our family -- that's how we're running Salesforce. From the beginning, we established trust as our No. 1 value. Putting our values in action, we're making our customers successful and improving the state of the world at the same time. And I have to say, I'm here in New York today, just went through our Salesforce Tower here in New York -- New York is our largest market in the world -- incredibly exciting what's happening here and what I see all these incredible people working in Salesforce. They're truly the best and brightest that I've seen. It's why we're recognized now by Fortune as the No. 1 Best Place to Work in the World. That is incredible for us. And, also, Fortune published earlier their Most Admired Company List in the world and we were ranked the 15th most admired company in the world and Forbes said we're the most innovative company of the year and their Innovator of the Decade.

We couldn't be more pleased and we could not have done it without all of you. We realize that we are all one family working together and we're very grateful and we're looking forward to an amazing Fiscal Year '19 ahead of us.

So, with that, now let me turn this over to Keith Block in San Francisco and Keith will give you perspective of how the company is operating. Keith, as you know, is our Vice Chairman and Chief Operating Officer. Keith?

Keith Block -- Vice Chairman, President, and Chief Operating Officer

Hey, thanks, Marc. Good afternoon, everybody. As you've already heard, we delivered just an outstanding fourth quarter to complete an exceptional year. We saw accelerating demand and strong execution coming from every industry, and every region, and every cloud, and across all our customer segments. More than ever, CEOs are coming to Salesforce because we fuel their growth and we are fueling their transformation. Salesforce continues to be mission-critical to the world's greatest companies and our strategic relationships are deeper than ever.

In fact, we have nearly twice as many $20 million plus relationships than we did just one year ago -- twice as many -- and our execution in Q4 was as strong as I've ever seen in my career. We closed more new business in Q4 than we did in the entire fiscal year of 2014. That is just four short years ago and it speaks volumes to the momentum that we now have in the market. We are closing more big deals every quarter. In fact, the number of $1 million plus deals grew 43% in Q4 and our average deal size continues to expand. Also, in the quarter, leading companies including Siemens, and ABB, and Google turned to Salesforce to help them transform and grow.

Now, as you know, international expansion is one of our key growth levers and we delivered very strong growth in the quarter -- 31% in EMEA and 26% in APAC in constant currency. In EMEA, ABB, one of the world's leading industrial technology companies, went all in with us and they're using Salesforce to get a broader understanding of their customers across sales, service, and marketing. Einstein AI is going to enable them to drive smarter sales and build deeper customer relationships. ABB also has an incredible vision to combine the power of Salesforce with ABB Ability and their industry-leading digital offering that enables 70 million connected devices -- a very, very strong partnership with ABB and we are thrilled to continue to grow along with them. We also formed a new relationship with Deutsche Bahn, which is the world's second largest transportation company, and we expanded our relationship with BBVA, who is rolling out our Financial Services Cloud for retail banking to over 24,000 advisors. We also formed a new relationship with one of the largest insurance groups in Europe and they're going wall-to-wall with Salesforce to get a complete view of our business and also to increase their employee engagement and deliver a seamless customer experience across all their brands. Great success in EMEA.

Also, moving over APAC, we continue to see just excellent momentum in financial services, specifically, in Australia where we are deepening our relationship with AMP, a leading wealth management company. We also had one of our largest Platform deals in APAC with an exciting company called Coin. If you're not familiar with Coin, they're innovating and scaling their cryptocurrency exchange on the Roku Platform. And, in Japan, we had another very strong quarter of incredible growth and strengthened our relationship with companies like Nissan and Amada.

So, really, to capture the opportunity in front of us, we continue to increase our international go-to-market resources operations and infrastructure to make sure that we conserve our global customers and continue our Enterprise scale. In fact, in FY '18, nearly 40% of our new hires were in regions outside the Americas.

Now, turning to industries, we also had a very strong performance across the board, but specifically in financial services. Now 18 of the top 20 U.S. and European banks rely on Salesforce and, in fact, in Q4 nearly half of those banks expanded their business with us in the quarter. Half of the banks expanded their business with us -- again, something that we're very, very proud of. That includes a significant expansion with one of the world's largest banks in the world, which will be deploying Financial Services Cloud across all their retail branches. TD Bank also selected Financial Services Cloud for retail banking to streamline their mortgage application process for customers. And, in addition, we expanded our relationship with TransAmerica -- they are extending Salesforce to an additional 60,000 insurance agents to give them a unified view of their clients. We also expanded with Pacific Life and Mass Mutual.

In healthcare, we expanded our relationship with Anthem, as well as another Fortune 50 healthcare company who is using Service Cloud to understand patient needs and provide more personalized care. We also deepened our relationship with the Cancer Treatment Centers of America, which is using Health cloud to improve patient outcomes. Now, you're going to hear more about our innovative healthcare partners and customers in Las Vegas next week at HIMSS, which is the country's largest healthcare technology conference.

As for our ecosystem, Salesforce continues to be the growth lever for our partners and more than 55% of our new businesses generated with our partners and, at the close of FY '18, our partners surpassed 110,000 Salesforce certifications. This is an increase of more than 30% over last year. Today, we have strategic partnerships with industry leaders including Dell, IBM, Amazon, and in FY '18, as you know, we went live on AWS infrastructure in Canada and Australia. And at Dreamforce, which was absolutely outstanding, we announced a new strategic partnership with Google to connect Salesforce with Google Cloud and Google Analytics to enable a smarter, more collaborative experience for customers.

On the topic of integration, as you know, this past year we were focused on making sure that we integrated the incredible companies that we acquired in FY '17, including Demandware. I will report this is going very, very well. In fact, during the 2017 holiday season, the Commerce Cloud touched 540 million unique shoppers. Commerce Cloud is now one of the largest commerce environments in the world alongside major marketplaces such as Amazon and Alibaba.

Now, Marc also mentioned that trust is our No. 1 value. It's obviously very, very important to us, but innovation is a core value, as well, and in the fourth quarter, we rolled out our Spring '18 release to all of our customers, which has over 300 innovations, including exciting enhancements to the Lightning Platform and new Einstein innovations across our clouds. And, speaking of Einstein, we are seeing tremendous momentum and we just hit an incredible milestone, producing over a billion predictions in a single day and nobody but Salesforce can deliver these deep customer insights at scale so it's very, very exciting with that momentum.

Finally, I want to give a quick update on the EU General Data Protection Regulation, which will come into effect on May 25th. We welcome the GDPR is an important step for customers to strengthen their privacy programs and we are committed to helping our customers prepare for it every single day. So, in closing, I want to thank our customers, our partners, our employees for their continued trust in us and for contributing to just an outstanding Q4 and just great full-year results so thanks, everybody, for that.

And now I'd like to turn it over to Mark Hawkins, who will talk about our financial execution in the quarter. Mark?

Mark Hawkins -- President and Chief Financial Officer

Great. Thanks, Keith. And, as you've heard, we've delivered another year of outstanding financial performance, enforcing strong top line and operating cash flow growth and we, importantly, delivered non-GAAP operating margin expansion for the fourth consecutive year. This is particularly significant given the exceptionally strong new business we achieved in the fourth quarter.

Let me discuss the highlights of Q4 and FY '18. The fourth quarter revenue grew 24% in dollars and 21% in constant currency, excluding the year-over-year FX tailwind of $64 million. We also saw sequential FX tailwind of $8 million. The full-year revenue grew 25% in dollars and 24% in constant currency.

We drove strong year-over-year subscription and support revenue growth across each of the clouds in the fourth quarter. Sales Cloud grew 16% and exited the year at $3.7 billion in terms of the run rate. Service Cloud grew 28% and is now at a run rate of more than $3.1 billion. Platform in other grew 37% and is now at a run rate of more than $2.1 billion and Marketing and Commerce Cloud grew 33% is now at a run rate of nearly $1.6 billion. Each of these clouds benefited from an FX tailwind that was similar to our revenue tailwind of approximately 3%. Dollar attrition for the fourth quarter, including Marketing Cloud, was slightly below 10%, which is an improvement over last year.

Turning to margins, you may recall in November we discussed the dynamics of increased operating margin pressure associated with accelerating growth during our Analyst Day presentation. We refer to this as model leverage. This is exactly what transpired in the fourth quarter as we saw an acceleration in our new business year-over-year and, therefore, incurred higher commissions and other selling-related expenses. In addition, there's four factors impacting our selling cost. First, our Enterprise strength; secondly, our strength in our international businesses; third, the investment and the strength in our newly acquired businesses; and then fourth, the acceleration of our sales hiring.

In that context, we're pleased to drive operating leverage in the business and, as a result, we delivered $128 basis points of non-GAAP operating margin improvement for the full-year. The fourth quarter non-GAAP EPS was $0.35, up 25% over last year. For the full-year, we delivered $1.35, up 34% over FY '17. EPS benefited by approximately $0.02 in the fourth quarter related to net realized gains from our strategic investment portfolio. Q4 operating cash flow was $1.05 billion, up 49% year-over-year. For the full year, we delivered $2.74 billion, up 27% over last year. This translated to an operating cash flow yield of 26.1%, which was up slightly over FY '17.

CapEx for the year was $534 million, or approximately 5.1% of revenue, down from 5.5% in FY '17. CapEx primarily consists of leasehold improvements followed by global datacenter investments. For FY '19, we expect CapEx to be approximately 5% of revenue. Turning to free cash flow -- and that's defined as cash flow less CapEx -- this was $914 million in the fourth quarter, up 63% over last year and I'm very pleased to report that our full-year free cash flow was $2.2 billion, up 30% over FY '17.

Deferred revenue ended the year at more than $7 billion, up 28% in dollars and 25% in constant currency, excluding an FX tailwind of $113 million. On a sequential basis, deferred revenue benefited from an FX tailwind of $56 million. Our unbilled deferred revenue ended the quarter at approximately $13.3 billion, up 48% over last year. And let me elaborate on those results. In addition to very strong quarter new business that we discussed, we also had a very strong renewal quarter, including some of the largest renewals in our history. By looking at our top ten customers up for renewal in Q4, 8 of the 10 expanded the relationships with us in this quarter. Both of these factors drove us to outstanding growth in our billed and unbilled deferred revenue.

Moving on to guidance, coming off our record fourth quarter, we are raising our full-year 2019 revenue guidance to $12.6 billion to $12.65 billion, up 20% and to 21% year-over-year growth. Our performance in FY '18, and especially the fourth quarter reinforces our confidence in our ability to reach our long-term target of $20 billion to $22 billion in revenue by FY '22.

With consistent durable growth guided for FY '19, we expect to deliver 125 to 150 basis points of non-GAAP operating margin improvement in FY '19, driven by continued improvement in operating leverage. We are lowering our fixed long-term projected non-GAAP tax rate to 21.5% for FY '19 from 34.5% in FY '18, primarily due to the new U.S. Tax Act and this rate reflects our currently available information. Due to our ongoing analysis of the tax act over the measurement period, as well as the rapidly evolving international tax environment and the operations of our business, this rate is subject to change.

We expect other income and expense to be roughly flat year-over-year when excluding the net realized gains from strategic investments recognized in FY '18. Keep in mind that, with the adoption of ASU 201601 in Q1, there may be additional OIE volatility as we look to market our investments as required. We are initiating our FY '19 GAAP diluted EPS of $0.61 to $0.63 and our non-GAAP diluted EPS guidance of $2.02 to $2.04. We expect a Full-Year Fiscal 2019 operating cash flow growth of 20% to 21% year-over-year. For Q1, we're expecting revenue of $2.925 billion to $2.935 billion, a GAAP diluted EPS of $0.09 to $0.10, and non-GAAP diluted EPS of $0.43 to $0.44.

Turning to deferred revenue, as we transition from ASC 605 to ASC 606 in Q1, we will no longer be reporting or guiding to deferred revenue. However, for consistency, we want to provide you with a bridge to the first quarter until we report under the new accounting standard. In that context, we expect our year-over-year deferred revenue growth of 23% to 24% in Q1. Let me remind you that these results in our guidance are all under the prior accounting standards, including ASC 605 and pre-revision ASC 340. We expected to provide our updated Q1 and FY '19 guidance including revenue and EPS under the new and revised accounting standards in the first quarter.

So, to close, our fourth quarter results drove an outstanding finish to the Fiscal 2018, including our fourth consecutive year of non-GAAP operating margin improvement. I'd like to thank our employees, our customers, our partners, and, yes, our shareholders, as well, for your continued support.

And, with that, I'd like to open up the call for questions.

John Cummings -- Senior Vice President, Investor Relations

Erica, we can begin the Q&A portion. Thanks.

Questions and Answers:

Operator

And, as a reminder, if you would like to ask a question at this time, simply press * then the number 1 on your telephone keypad. And we'll pause for just a moment to compile the Q&A roster.

And your first question comes from Karl Keirstead from Deutsche Bank.

Karl Keirstead -- Deutsche Bank -- Managing Director, Software Equity Research

Thank you. I wanted to congratulate you on that unbilled backlog number of $13.3 billion. That's amazing. It's a two-parter: maybe, for Keith, what's causing the unbilled to ramp so high? I know Marc mentioned a lot of renewals, but are these larger deals longer-term contracts that are contributing to that? And then, maybe for Mark Hawkins, we don't know what the duration of that unbilled backlog is -- can you offer any color as to how it will roll into deferred revenue in Fiscal '19 and Fiscal '20? Thanks so much.

Marc Benioff -- Chairman and Chief Executive Officer

Yeah. Hi, this is Keith. So, thanks for the question. There's a few things here that I think are really contributing to what's going on here. And, at the end of the day, it really comes back to the strategic relationships that we're driving with these customers. They are more deeper, they are more meaningful relationships, we're driving their digital transformations, and that results in more large contracts than ever, more large customers than ever, longer contracts in terms of duration, and a lot of multi-cloud solutions -- because we're selling solutions and not so much features and functions.

So, all of those are certainly contributing to the financial metrics that you're referencing in your question but, at the end of the day, these are deeper, longer relationships with these customers and that's why the deals are longer and we're seeing the renewals, which, obviously, is a huge, huge indicator of their confidence in our solutions and in our partnerships. And we've had a record number of very large renewals as well.

Mark Hawkins -- President and Chief Financial Officer

Yeah, and I would just add on to Keith's point. I totally agree -- the deeper and strategic relationships people want to go longer and bigger with us, as you can see in the numbers. In terms of billed, specifically, the duration for unbilled DR, that duration's up slightly, about a month.

Operator

And your next question comes from Kash Rangan with Merrill Lynch.

Kash Rangan -- Bank of America Merrill Lynch -- Managing Director

Hi. Congratulations on a spectacular finish. It's been, what, 13, 14 years since you went public. Question for Marc, as you look at other large technology companies in software, without naming names, they have had a hard time getting to $20 billion in revenue and maintaining very solid growth rate. How should we think about Salesforce.com, given your organic revenue target of $20 billion, how much can the company continue to grow at an exciting enough pace, capitalizing on all the innovation that you see in the industry? What is different about this cycle versus the older peers that have struggled to maintain that kind of growth? That's it for me. Thank you. Congratulations.

Marc Benioff -- Chairman and Chief Executive Officer

Well, thanks, Kash. And I'll really just start out by congratulating Keith and his whole organization because, honestly, I've just never seen a quarter like this -- this was a blowout quarter. And just the performance of that organization and their acuity capability to deliver was shocking even to me. And it shows up right there in that number and you can see it right there in front of you now. I've been really excited to be able to talk about that with you, more than $20 billion of both business on and off the balance sheet, up 40%. There is no way we could have said that to you a year ago.

That is beyond our expectation and it really has to do with the performance of the organization, No. 1. No. 2, and this really gets to your point, I think that -- and I had dinner last night with 20 Fortune 100 CEOs here in New York, which is one of the reasons that I came to town -- and, of course, we're all on a very fast-moving economic freight train. We've seen incredible increase in investment activity with our customers, especially accelerated with these tax cuts -- that has been amazing to us -- but squarely in the center of each and every one of their consciousness is the digital transformation that their company is going through. It doesn't matter if they're a consumer product goods company CEO, or financial services, or retail, or any industry, or any geography. Any CEO is thinking about their digital transformation and I think you and I know that every digital transformation begins and end with the customer.

This is very powerful and it's why we have so much activity in our company. Of course, we're the No. 1 customer company in the world. No other company in the history of the software industry has been as focused on customer relationship management, but how companies can have a customer transformation as Salesforce. And this, and this alone, focus has accelerated our growth -- you can see that in the numbers.

Co, certainly, how we finished our year in Fiscal Year '18 is not where we thought we would start. We raised guidance, I think, in each and every quarter and yet we still edged up above that and that's why we raised again here $150 million -- this is the most we've ever raised in the history of the company -- because we're just ahead of where we thought we'd be. So, we are, obviously, $10 billion is now behind us and $20 billion is ahead of us and it's our dream -- we're going to be the fastest to $20 billion. But, when you have $20 billion already on and off the balance sheet, you know that that is... we're a huge step on the way there so that's what I couldn't be more excited about the position the company is in, its competitiveness, its ability to perform, the quality of its customer relationships, the quality of the products, the integration of the acquisitions, the culture -- Fortune No. 1 Company to Work For -- all these things come together in just a really beautiful way and I'm extremely grateful.

Operator

And your next question comes from Richard Davis with Canaccord.

Richard Davis -- Canaccord Genuity -- Managing Director

Hey, thanks very much. It's a strategy question: so, if you think about it, whatever, 15 years ago, no one thought software companies could run hardware and then, today, you have Amazon, Google, Microsoft with cloud computing systems. So, the question that I wrestle with is, right now, you guys use those compute layer firms for search capacity -- you and others -- but why or why not would it make sense for Salesforce to push out most of its computeload to these specialists? Does that ever make sense in the future, just thinking about full circle in terms of evolution? Thanks?

Marc Benioff -- Chairman and Chief Executive Officer

Yeah. Well, I think that the way to think about that is we have a comprehensive integrated approach and where it makes sense to use infrastructure -- for example, in a country like Canada or Singapore -- we have tremendous relationships with organizations like Amazon and Google where we're going to do that. Even during the quarter, we've announced that we're going to be using IBM as it becomes one of our preferred cloud providers. That's appropriate to have our ability to operate proprietary data centers like we do here in the United States. We also use that infrastructure, for example, under each one of our core Platforms for Roku, as you know, which has become one of the largest application development capabilities in the world. And we are also live on Amazon in Canada and Australia. So, we will use the correct provider at the correct time, whether that's us or whether that's the Amazon, Google, or IBM.

Operator

And your next question comes from Heather Bellini from Goldman Sachs.

Heather Bellini -- Goldman Sachs -- Managing Director

Great. Thank you. Marc, listening to your comments about the macro, I guess I'm wondering how far back would you have to go to find a time that you were equally as positive on the demand environment? And I guess the second question is just, with Einstein being embedded more and more into your product set, how do you see monetization evolving? Thank you.

Marc Benioff -- Chairman and Chief Executive Officer

Well, Einstein, let's start there. We're ahead of our predictions there, also, and that's what I said it's all about. We're doing, I think, it's more than 1 billion predictions a day with Einstein already so our systems are dramatically enhanced through our deep machine intelligence, machine learning, and deep learning architecture known as Einsteins -- still, of course, Einstein, which has become a critical part of our CIRM.

First and foremost, highly differentiated against our competition, who has yet to be able to put in artificial intelligence to the quality capability and scale that we have it deeply integrated into our application set across the board. Whether you're using Commerce Cloud like Adidas is, whether you're using Sales Cloud like Sysco is, or whether you're using an incredible product like Service Cloud like Intuit is, Einstein is in there now and customers love it because it just makes their employees better. It's the perfect use case for artificial intelligence enhancing human performance. And we're going to do a lot more of that -- we've only really been at this now for about a year, but it's going far better than we expected and we'll continue to enhance and extend our artificial intelligence capability.

In regards to the overall demand environment, in my personal experiences with chief executive officers over the last month in both international, specifically in DAVOS, where I was with hundreds of CEO, or in other business forums here domestically where I've also been with hundreds of CEOs, I can empirically tell you I have never seen a demand environment like this. I cannot quantify that. I can just tell you that every CEO is using the positive economic environment, but also the domestic tax cuts as ways to accelerate their digital transformations and it is putting it, No. 1 on all of their lists, which it should be. And this is really exciting for us -- and for others, of course -- but, for a company like us, we can help these companies get connected with their customers in a whole new way and we have the ability, we have the great products, and we have the distribution capacity to be able to directly address them. I hope that answers your question.

Operator

And your next question comes from John DeFunti with Jefferies.

John DeFunti -- Jefferies -- Analyst

Thank you. The question I have is on the Enterprise business and I think it's mainly for Keith but maybe for Mark Hawkins, too. Keith, from our work, that Enterprise business really started to kick in a little more than two years ago and one of the nice things about this segment is that, when you become a strategic vendor or partner to your customers -- some of the stuff that Marc Benioff was talking about -- in time, they come back and they buy more from you, which is often in the form of add-on, large deals again, whether it's more seats or more products. You talked about this happening in financial services, but we're also hearing about it in your other vertical focus areas. I guess the question is shouldn't those add-on or follow-up deals essentially be more efficient captures and, for instance, requiring a shorter sales cycle? Shouldn't this, at least directionally, be more profitable over time? And I realize you've already given guidance on -- Mark Hawkins has and you have other investments to make -- but, just on this particular area, I just want to understand how this should evolve over time.

Marc Benioff -- Chairman and Chief Executive Officer

Hey, Keith, before you jump in on that, I just want Mark to specifically address that because...

Mark Hawkins -- President and Chief Financial Officer

Yeah, happy to do so and, John, thank you for the question. In fact, we are raising our profitability, as we talked about. This is the fifth year in a row of expanding the profitability. One of the things that we see, akin to what we talked about at the Dreamforce Analyst Day is that there are some costs incurred with growth, basically, that impact the short-term, but we still were able to expand our operating margin.

Marc Benioff -- Chairman and Chief Executive Officer

What happens when we blow out a quarter like we did in Q4, Mark? Does that impact, then, the amount of profit we show for that quarter?

Mark Hawkins -- President and Chief Financial Officer

Impact, it does. What happens is we'll take go-to-market expenses like commissions and that type of thing in the short-term and now you'll see that show up and then, basically, what we have is great long-term economics that benefit. So, one of the things that I would say --

Marc Benioff -- Chairman and Chief Executive Officer

So, what you're saying is you'll see if we have a great quarter in expansion -- for revenue, for example -- but, in quarter expense for commission, it also expands.

Mark Hawkins -- President and Chief Financial Officer

This is exactly right.

Marc Benioff -- Chairman and Chief Executive Officer

So, should we tell Keith, then, to be selling less? Is that the point?

Mark Hawkins -- President and Chief Financial Officer

No, I think the thing that's powerful about this is that we have... If you think about creating annuity, it has a lifetime economics of north of 35% margin and what we're seeing is the short-term pressure, even with add-on businesses, Marc. If we're paying commissions when people finish with a strong year, you're going to have accelerators and that type of thing -- people have a strong demand environment, which we saw with the billed and unbilled DR and, in fact, that has a short-term depressive effect -- but we still delivered. This is the point: we still delivered the margin expansion despite that.

Marc Benioff -- Chairman and Chief Executive Officer

Right. So, we should tell Keith, then, to go ahead and sell in Q1?

Mark Hawkins -- President and Chief Financial Officer

Definitely.

Marc Benioff -- Chairman and Chief Executive Officer

Alright. Very good. Keith, you can go ahead, then, in the first quarter and, if you blow it out again, it's OK -- we'll handle it. Go ahead.

Keith Block -- Vice Chairman, President, and Chief Operating Officer

Yeah, I think you gentlemen articulated that very nicely. So, I think the only thing that I would add to that, John, is Mark used the term "lifetime economics" and I think, as we all know, we run a balanced portfolio business and we do a lot of work in the S&B, we do a lot of stuff in the mid-market. We have focused, as you pointed out, a lot in the Enterprise as we continue to become a global company and become an Enterprise class company, that means longer, deeper relationships as I said in my opening comments.

But we really are playing the long game here and I guess there are two factors that I think about. One is the fact that we are able to land and expand in these large accounts and, over time, build up those very strategic relationships, which really culminate in these very large deals. You think about doubling the number of $20 million relationships that we have year-over-year, that's pretty staggering, but that also bodes well for the long game. And, of course, you would expect that there would be natural efficiencies over time, but the other thing you ought to think about, too, is that many of these deals are aligned to the schedule of the customers as they deploy. A lot of this, as you suggested, is when a customer is up for renewal, we have the opportunity to expand the solution because the demand is there or because we've demonstrated our capabilities because we understand their business because we speak the language of the customer and their industry and that's why a lot of these renewals also included additional sales associated with them. So, we're just executing very, very well across the board and a balanced portfolio and I will say I'm proud of every organization in the company that is focused in all these market segments and all these geographies.

But, yes, we have been focusing a lot on the Enterprise -- it's a relatively new capability within the age scale of Salesforce -- but the execution has just been fantastic.

Operator

Your next question comes from Mark Murphy with JP Morgan.

Mark Murphy -- JP Morgan -- Managing Director, Software Equity Research

Yeah, thank you. So, Marc, you described it as perhaps our best quarter ever and, Keith, you said execution was as strong as you've seen in your career -- and it's a long, decorated career, obviously. The number that is mind-bending is the 48% growth in the unbilled deferred revenue and so I think that was growing in the 20X demand. Can you help us understand, maybe, just what that number looks like if we try to normalize it for renewals in an extra month of duration, would it be 40% if we just try to uncover the new ECV bookings growth? And, if you can't do that, is there just any other way to try to convey the acceleration that you mentioned in new business growth?

Mark Hawkins -- President and Chief Financial Officer

Keith, I can help a little bit on that, too, if you'd like, on the normalization if that would be helpful. Why don't I just share, from that standpoint, if you think, again, we're talking about only unbilled DR, we put up a number of 48% because of the expanded and deeper relationships that the customers are driving, but if you adjust the term --

Marc Benioff -- Chairman and Chief Executive Officer

For short, that Keith had a good quarter.

Mark Hawkins -- President and Chief Financial Officer

He had a very good quarter.

Marc Benioff -- Chairman and Chief Executive Officer

A very good quarter.

Mark Hawkins -- President and Chief Financial Officer

And so, even you adjust when the customers wanted a slightly longer relationship because it's more strategic for the month, you have a number instead of 48%, it's going closer to 39% on the unbilled if you normalize for that extension that the customers are asking for. So, to Marc's point, even with that normalization, this is just a number that you'd have to go back a lot of years to try to find that. I hope that helps and, Keith, you might want to add.

Marc Benioff -- Chairman and Chief Executive Officer

Well, I think that, Mark, the analysts and investors are looking at this and they're seeing these are percentages that are much higher against companies that we've seen report this week and last week -- cloud companies who are dramatically smaller than we are -- so we're seeing much stronger rates. Is that fair?

Mark Hawkins -- President and Chief Financial Officer

I think that the growth at this scale is really... it characterizes what you and Keith said about an outstanding quarter. The top line is very, very strong and I think one of the things that Keith said that I feel, also, based on talking to a lot of customers, is that the deepness of the relationships -- you can feel it, you can see it. And we've been talking about this for a few years, but that's something that we really see in the commercial side.

Marc Benioff -- Chairman and Chief Executive Officer

And, Keith, do you want to address that? Coming into the quarter when we were on the earnings call about 90 days ago, you were obviously expecting a good quarter -- we gave very strong guidance -- so how did the quarter play out for you?

Keith Block -- Vice Chairman, President, and Chief Operating Officer

Well, look, I think this is a high performing company with a culture of high performance, along with a culture of a lot of great things. And, look, I think in every quarter we expect high performance but, again, I go back to my opening comments about it was just really outstanding execution. We always expect great execution and this happened to be one of those quarters -- it's one for the ages -- and so we're very, very excited about it. But, if I think about what happened behind it, we've been investing for this for a very, very long time. When you think about our industry specialization, when you think about our international expansion, when you think about our partner ecosystem, these are three growth levers that have propelled us past the $10 billion mark -- we're hurtling down the highway toward $20 billion -- and these are foundational things that help us turn the corner when we approach 20s.

So, you add all these things up with the right investments, with great execution, with a growth environment, a situation where the agenda for CEOs is growth and our message and promise is all about growth, everything just aligned very, very nicely. So, again, very, very proud of the entire company for just a complete set of execution in the quarter.

Mark Hawkins -- President and Chief Financial Officer

And Keith, I just want to add one point that you noted here, which is, in Q4, we did invest an additional capacity to get prepared for this $20 billion to $22 billion in FY 2020 in terms of ADs and that type of thing, as well, so that's a good attribute for us to position for the future, but that's also important for people to know it's an investment we made in Q4 as well.

Operator

And your next question comes from Raymond Chou from Barclays.

Raymond Chou-- Barclays -- Analyst

Thanks for taking my questions. Congrats from me as well. I just wanted to see if you could double click a little bit on the performances you saw in the different clouds, especially Service Cloud reaccelerated again and it's now on-track to maybe almost take over from the Sales Cloud. Just talk a little bit to what you're seeing in different ones, especially on the Service Cloud. Thank you.

Keith Block -- Vice Chairman, President, and Chief Operating Officer

This is Keith. Well, I'm happy to jump in on that. And our President of Products is sitting right next to me, Bret Taylor, so he might want to chime in as well. But, look, we saw a very strong balance across all of our clouds, which speaks to, again, our ability to have multi-cloud solutions and, specifically, around service. If you think about how companies are differentiating themselves, they differentiate with service and we have the leading solution in service, we're the market leader, we continue to separate and take market share in Service Cloud, we've had very, very strong execution, and, of course, that drags additional products. But, again, service is very, very strong and, whether it's core service or whether it's field service, these are differentiated products. I don't know, Bret, if you want to respond to that.

Bret Taylor -- President and Chief Product Officer

Yeah, I just want to say you think about transforming the customer experience, increasingly, your brand is defined by your customer service, and that's really what this product represents. And, beyond that, it's also being served by the technological changes we talked a lot about in the fourth industrial revolution. If you look at the confluence of artificial intelligence, the growth of devices like the Amazon Echo, the Google Home, mobility, they are transforming customer expectations about customer experience and customer service. And I think, as consumer demands shift and our Platform really represents the opportunity for our customers to modernize their customer service experience, it's really becoming the tip of the spear for our customer strategy to transform their customer relationships.

Operator

And your next question comes from Bhavan Suri from William Blair.

Bhavan Suri -- William Blair & Co. -- Partner, Technology, Media, and Communications

Hey guys, thanks for taking my question. I'll add my congrats to the host out there. But two strategic questions, I guess, and maybe for everyone on the queue. So, first on Einstein and the AI, the use cases are pretty broad so you've got some of this lead scoring stuff and then you've got stuff as deep as some of the stuff you've seen with Coca-Cola coolers and things like that. As you think about customers, how are they migrating and what percentage have use cases that are much more complex? And then how are you guys thinking about pricing those? Because the ROI on the value-add as you get to more complex AI becomes dramatically... it's huge so how are you thinking about pricing it? And then my second question -- maybe for Bret, even -- is Dware seems to be doing really well but, obviously, that's just B to C. How do you guys think about the B to B commerce business opportunity, which in dollars, may be even bigger than B to C? I'd just love to get some color on those two things. Thank you.

Marc Benioff -- Chairman and Chief Executive Officer

Well, I think we should specifically start with that B to B opportunity, huh, Keith?

Bret Taylor -- President and Chief Product Officer

Yeah, I think the evolution of sales versus the company, we started as a B to B company. Over the past five years or so, we've really expanded our B to C offerings. And the trend we see broadly is those two markets really emerging where B to B companies, their customers are demanding B to C experiences because their expectations are being set by these best of breed consumer experiences and consumer technologies. And we think that one of Salesforce's unique advantages as it relates to B to B and B to C is the fact that we do both. We're really the only company that has a complete customer success Platform for both B to B and B to C and it means that, for B to B companies, we can enable them to provide consumer-grade experiences, which is very unique in the marketplace. And, for B to C companies, we bring this incredible deep legacy of providing these next generation sales and service experiences and that experience is really driving our strategy in the B to C space. So, we really view that as one of our strategic advantages, as the fact that those are blurring and we are equally interested in both parts of that market. And I think, Keith, do you want to take the artificial intelligence question?

Keith Block -- Vice Chairman, President, and Chief Operating Officer

Yes, I'm happy to talk about artificial intelligence all day long. No, I just, look -- I know there was a question about pricing and Mark Benioff may want to weigh in on this -- but, look, at the end of the day, we're at the dawn of a new era and we're very, very excited about Einstein. We've got a lot of momentum -- Marc talked about the billion interactions and insights that are provided on a daily basis and we're really excited about that. That tells you a lot about what the potential can be. And we get excited because our AI, Einstein, is applied to specific use cases around sales, and service, and marketing and we have companies who continue to experiment and expand with Einstein.

ABB is a classic example of that -- Einstein is being used to help bring better experiences in their sales cycles with their customers as well as the way that they service their customers and that is all hooked up into IoT. So, you can imagine the possibilities with all those data being collected on their devices and their robots and how Einstein can help them gain better insight.

So, it is early days. I think, over time, we'll be very creatively and in an innovative way to sort through the pricing of Einstein but, again, our customers seem to really, really enjoy the benefits that we're seeing.

Operator

Your next question comes from Keith Weiss with Morgan Stanley.

Keith Weiss -- Morgan Stanley -- Equity Analyst

Excellent. Thank you, guys, for taking the question and, again, good quarter. Marc, I totally agree with you -- I'm all for allowing Keith to go out and find another $2 billion in subscription business because, at the end of the day, we know that's going to generate really good cash flows over time.

Marc Benioff -- Chairman and Chief Executive Officer

I'm glad we're on the same page there.

Keith Weiss -- Morgan Stanley -- Equity Analyst

Excellent. And you guys have been generating a lot of cash building up on the balance sheet. There hasn't been a lot of M&A in overall software and you guys haven't done anything big in a while. How should we think about the M&A environment going into Calendar 2018 and the year ahead for you guys?

Mark Hawkins -- President and Chief Financial Officer

Sure. What do I think? And let me just lead, if I may Keith, and thanks for the note comments. I think that we always look for -- over the history of the company, we look at companies that can add to our customer satisfaction and customer success, we look at great entrepreneurs, we look for very unique things in the world that can help and be added to as we go to the future in our marketspace so that will not change. And so, you should expect that the way we've operated and the way we think about that, there's real continuity to that from that standpoint. That would be a starting point and, as far as the cash on the balance sheet, I'll just add that we're always looking at that, we're always looking at our capital allocation, but the No. 1 thing we think about with the capital allocation is the fund growth and that's our starting point for everything in that respect. So, I'll turn it over to Mark, or to Keith, or Bret for further comments. Keith, any additional comments?

Keith Block -- Vice Chairman, President, and Chief Operating Officer

Yeah. Look, I think we've talked about this historically that, when we think about M&A, we have a thought-out process and methodology and Mark Hawkins is exactly right: we look at a number of characteristics when we think about our growth strategy. But, most importantly, when we think about acquisitions, we listen to our customers. Many times, our customers guide us in terms of what we should be thinking about in terms of solutions for them. So, whether it's the technology, the people, it's part of the acquisition, the culture and, of course, the financial metrics -- these are all things that we consider. And, again, there is a strategy and it's well thought-out and there's a process to it.

Marc Benioff -- Chairman and Chief Executive Officer

I think we could also have Bret touch on that since is the product of one of our great acquisitions. Bret?

Bret Taylor -- President and Chief Product Officer

I'm personally biased, but I think Salesforce has had an incredible acquisition strategy. Just joking. No, I think it's very important that, when we think about growth, we align ourselves with our customers and align ourselves with the technological trends that are shifting our customers' customers' expectations. And, fundamentally, I think that the reason why our customers have partnered with Salesforce in these increasingly deep relationships is because they view Salesforce not just as a suite of products we have today, but as a partner to help guide them in the technological transformations that are coming in decades to come and that will always involve a combination of organic and inorganic innovation. And I think I'll just add to Keith's point that we are really following our customers and also making sure that, as we recognize significant technology trends like artificial intelligence that are shifting our customers' expectations, that we are aggressively leading by example there so that our customers can depend on us as that technology partner.

Operator

And your next question comes from Kirk Materne with Evercore ISI.

Kirk Materne -- Evercore ISI Partners -- Managing Director

Thanks very much and I'll add my congrats on the really strong close to the year. Keith, obviously, one of the great successes over the last couple years has been your vertical orientation, both from a go-to-market and a product perspective -- obviously, a great year for financial services, in particular, but I'm sure a lot of other verticals. My question is about healthcare. Healthcare has been a vertical or an industry that's been desperate for innovation for a while as people are changing the way you pay for healthcare. Your strategy would seem to make a lot of sense. I was just curious if you think 2018 -- or the next however you want to couch it from a time frame -- are the customers poised to start thinking differently and are they talking to you differently about how you can help them transform into more of a patient-oriented organization? Thanks.

Keith Block -- Vice Chairman, President, and Chief Operating Officer

Yeah, Kirk, great to hear from you. So, look, obviously, the vertical strategy is paying off. And you mentioned financial services, as well, and we've seen a very interesting change in that dynamic environment -- when you think about the ease of regulations, the changes in the tax laws, that has just created an environment where IT dollars can now be spent more on innovation than on maintaining the legacy environments around compliance, as an example, so that's exciting. Similarly, in healthcare, one of the things that's changing in the healthcare industry is technology, overall, No. 1; No. 2, if you think about it, patients are more empowered by technology than ever before so these healthcare companies and the healthcare industry, overall, is ripe for transformation. That being said, it can be unclear at times in terms of because of regulations and the regulatory environment, where exactly healthcare is going.

In the quarter, we signed up and expanded some very, very strong relationships in the healthcare industry. Fortune 50, that is looking to transform their business with our Health Cloud -- one of our organic industry products. I mentioned Anthem, which is, obviously, a very, very strong and leading healthcare provider. So, whether it's patients, whether it's providers, whether it's medical device manufacturers, there are many, many ways to transform those industries around customer, or client, or patient engagement. Service, as an example, really becomes front and center when you think about the mission of a healthcare provider.

So, we have a pretty good vision for where the healthcare industry is going. We try to do a lot of collaboration and co-creation with our customers. We also listen to our customers and let them guide us, but we think this potentially could be a very, vey big area for us.

Operator

And your last question comes from Adam Holt from MoffettNathanson.

Adam Holt -- MoffettNathanson -- Partner, Software Analyst

Hi, everyone. Thanks for taking the question. My question's about the Platform and other business. It looked like it accelerated in the quarter in an environment that some people might characterize as being more competitive with the public clouds and some of the application vendors now are more aggressively touting their own platform as a service business. How do you think about the drivers of the strength there this quarter and the outlook for the next several quarters? Maybe that's a question for Marc Benioff? I'm not sure, but I appreciate the answer. Thank you.

Marc Benioff -- Chairman and Chief Executive Officer

Well, I think we've moved into a new world, the fourth industrial revolution. We all know that. We can see the huge advancements in technology at our fingertips -- how we're running this call, all the computers and mobile devices that we're using, the artificial intelligence that we talked about, the autonomous vehicle that I saw going down the street today. There's so many exciting things that are happening -- information sciences and biotechnology sciences -- but, as every company sees the fourth industrial revolution under way, they have to pick their place in it. What are you going to do? What is your position? And, also, what are your values? What's important to you? These two ideas -- your vision and your values -- I think will define who will be successful and who will fail in the fourth industrial revolution.

For us, it's very simple: we squarely believe that we're in the age of a customer and that, for each and every one of our companies that we deal with around the world, that they have to connect with their customer in a whole new way and to build this hi-fidelity relationship, whether they're a B to B or B to C customer, that they need to have this single view of the customer. It doesn't matter like, in the previous discussion, it could be healthcare, it could be financial services, it could be retail -- in each and every case, company by company is thinking, "How do I get to a single view of the customer?" That is Salesforce's single focus and we do that across many product lines, as you know.

And, in terms of what is important to us, well, there's nothing more important than trust. Trust is our highest value and, of course, growth is important to us as well -- you can see that in our numbers today -- and innovation, as Bret was talking about. The reason we're the No. 1 CRM in the world is the tremendous innovation that we've brought to customers like we have in things like Einstein or our new Lightning Platform, or even Trailhead, where you can learn how to become part of the Salesforce economy and jump on this train so that you can be part of the fourth industrial revolution and be part of Salesforce. These things are so important. You can see how it shows up on our app statement for the thousands of apps and companies that have been birthed through this vision.

And then, at the end of the day, we all have to be aware that the fourth industrial revolution has a dark side and it could be that it creates more inequality and that's why our core value we talked about is equality -- that we so squarely believe that we have to keep an eye on the equality of every human being, whether it's our employees, or our customers, the communities that we're in, or even the environment our public education systems. And that these four values -- trust, and growth, and innovation, and equality -- continue to serve us very well in our pursuit in this age of the customer.

Well, I want to thank everyone for an amazing fiscal year: all of our employees, customers, partners, all of our ohana. Thank you for everything that you've done for us. Every single day, we appreciate it so greatly. And we will see you again at Trailhead PX, our annual Salesforce developer conference, which will be March 28th and 29th in San Francisco and I hope that all of you will join us for this exciting event. We'll have some very exciting product news and some incredible surprises there. And I'm about to show up on Cramer from Salesforce Tower here in New York City in just a couple minutes -- if you'll turn on CNBC, you'll see me there. Thanks, everybody, and we'll see you next quarter.

Operator

This concludes today's conference call and you may now disconnect.

Duration: 62 minutes

Call participants:

John Cummings -- Senior Vice President, Investor Relations

Marc Benioff -- Chairman and Chief Executive Officer

Keith Block -- Vice Chairman, President, and Chief Operating Officer

Mark Hawkins -- President and Chief Financial Officer

Bret Taylor -- President and Chief Product Officer

Karl Keirstead -- Deutsche Bank -- Managing Director, Software Equity Research

Kash Rangan -- Bank of America Merrill Lynch -- Managing Director

Richard Davis -- Canaccord Genuity -- Managing Director

Heather Bellini -- Goldman Sachs -- Managing Director

John DeFunti -- Jefferies -- Analyst

Mark Murphy -- JP Morgan -- Managing Director, Software Equity Research

Raymond Chou-- Barclays -- Analyst

Bhavan Suri -- William Blair & Co. -- Partner, Technology, Media, and Communications

Keith Weiss -- Morgan Stanley -- Equity Analyst

Kirk Materne -- Evercore Partners -- Managing Director

Adam Holt -- Moffett Nathanson -- Partner, Software Analyst

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